Monday, January 14, 2008

No taxation without forced copulation

Jim Henley's blog is a fine one indeed, but should you choose to roll over there, try to keep one eye cocked towards the high grass. Henley's an avowed libertarian (whatever that means these days) and if you were to hack your way into the wilderness that is his blogroll, you might very quickly find yourself well past the tangled, overgrown foothills of unreason and deep into the very mountains of madness themselves.

Case in point, as Rod Serling might crisply intone: Some guy named Ted Frank, of a blog called Overlawyered:

Police more likely to sleep with than arrest prostitutes

The Venkatesh-Levitt paper on the economics of prostitution in Chicago shows that prostitutes are arrested about one out of every 450 tricks—but are forced to give "freebies" to police for about 3% of their tricks to avoid arrest.

On the one hand, I'm appalled at the utter corruption exhibited by law enforcement here, and wonder to what extent this illegal "perk" acts as a public-choice rationale for law enforcement to oppose legalization and regulation of brothels.

On the other hand, that 3% of labor extorted by the police is a heck of a better rate than the 30% or so tax rate various governments make me pay...

Libertarians don't exactly represent; put any eighteen of them in the same place at the same time and you'll quickly end up deluged and besieged with eighteen entirely individual iconoclastic visions of a The Way Things Ought To Be In A World Without Authority. Still, it bemuses me to imagine that 'sieur Frank might speak for a majority of his fellow surly reprobates with the above assertion. I mean, nobody likes taxes, and nobody HATES taxes like de libertarian mon, but, still, this is the first time I've seen one come right out and say that a forced face fucking from a random gendarme or two a couple of times a month would look good to him compared to paying a 30% tax rate on his income.

You wonder what the trade off ratio is there. Would the average libertarian pay 20% if he/she only had to take cop-dick up the ass once or twice every thirty days? Would he/she blow six or seven officers of de law a month if they could get their taxes all the way down to 6%? Would they take a flatfoot in every orifi twice a week if it let them live gloriously tax free? And would the built in advantage this would give male libertarians over female be acceptable to the libertarian community en masse?

These questions may be stupid, and they're certainly rhetorical, but, like the guy in the Styx song, I've got too much time on my hands.

I go for the derisive funny because often it seems the best way to me to express utter contempt for something utterly contemptible. Having done that, though, I probably got into that spirit a bit too much, so let me note here that this whole post started with my shock and dismay at this particular libertarian's display of callousness.

The bottom line here is, we're talking about powerful men raping helpless women regularly, because those women have nowhere else to turn -- because, in fact, the people they should be able to turn TO for protection are the ones doing the raping.

Anyone who can spin the regular rape of desperate, helpless women by men who are supposed to be their protectors into 'that 3% of labor extorted by the police' is a truly appalling excuse for a human being.

And then, when they go on to muse that, y'know, this kind of experience may be preferable to actually paying a certain tax rate, well....

It's not really a subject for levity. But sometimes when you encounter a person with such a rudimentary and stunted capacity for empathy (and nearly all libertarians are, at base, socially autistic, at the very least), the best way to reach them (to the extent that they are reachable at all by the responses of others to their behavior) is by pointing and laughing at them.

Appalled disgust, after all, is something they've gotten all their lives. Not only have they learned to disregard such reactions, they have become so twisted that they are actually proud to have inspired such. Hooting derision, on the other hand, will still manage to at least leave a little mark on them... unless they're too far gone, of course.